Tender is the Night | The Pursuit of Happiness
In the following excerpt, Callahan discusses the “pursuit of happiness” in Fitzgerald’s novel.
“France was a land, England was a people, but America, having about it still that quality of the idea, was harder to utter.” In this passage from “The Swimmers,” a 1929 story later distilled into his Notebooks, Fitzgerald evokes the anguished intense patriotism he finds in American faces from Abraham Lincoln’s to those of the “country boys dying in the Argonne for a phrase that was empty before their bodies withered” (CU 197). For Fitzgerald that American “quality of the idea” finds most worthy expression in the impulse to offer the best of yourself on behalf of...
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